I’m beginning to remember why I don’t make date-specific promises. Yeah, it’s far from Monday, totally my bad about that. Anyway, I’ve been watching a fair bit of gaming history stuff, like Balrog’s Gaming 101 and reading entirely too much stuff from The Cutting Room Floor and Did You Know Gaming, so I’m in a retrospective kind of mood. Today, I’m going to take a look at one of my favorite concepts.

Imagine if your favorite developer had a museum dedicated to its history. I know that a lot of ‘normal’ museums sometimes host video game exhibits, but that’s not what I’m talking about. This would be a museum completely dedicated to video games, with rooms in the style of the game in question. For example, Tower of Druaga’s hallways would look like corridors from the game or The Genji and Heike Clans would have this creepy, Japanese graveyard feel to it.

That was the Namco Museum series in a nutshell. You got the chance to explore Namco’s history in a first-person perspective, and it wasn’t just the well-known titles like Galaga or the various types of Pac-Man. The entire series on the original Playstation consisted of five games, whose boxart cleverly spelled out “NAMCO” in big red letters and the arcade games featured included a huge variety of titles.

I know I’m talking more about the museum part than the actual games, but… The museum part is what made this series special. To my knowledge, nobody’s ever let you wander around and look at things like the PC boards or cabinet art, which is a damn shame. Imagine if Nintendo did this for, say, Kirby or Mario’s anniversaries instead of the (admittedly very nice) ‘normal’ game compilation.

Anyway, if you guys have never played the series, definitely check it out. Walking up to Pac-Man in his Pac-Land hat or getting greeted by the shopkeeper from Ordyne is such a cool experience that you’ll wish more people gave the idea a shot.

Anyway, all this writing makes me want to play some more. I’ll talk to you fine folks sometime soon. As always, thanks for reading and have a good’un. Also, you guys have no idea how much fun the header image for this was to set up.